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with different behavior patterns; personalities that don't necessarily
mix well.
In the practice literature, this problem is tagged as creating the
Ambidextrous Organization able to both explore and exploit at the
same time. As the need to adapt becomes more intense, the profit
implications of organizing to both explore and exploit become more
profound.

Competence Erosion
As the rate of required adaptation accelerates, driven in part by
technological advances, the lifespan of an individual's and
organization's competence will likely be eroded. At the task level of a
system, this implies the need for continuous retraining and self-driven
technical education. This is what is behind the shift to lifetime
technical retraining and the dramatic growth in corporate and
individual e-learning.

Or Not!

At the system-leadership level of a system, curiously enough, re-
education can be expected to move more slowly with a focus on
understanding context and the adaptation of the system. At that level,
the content of the technology and the opportunities it creates may
change but the system-level solutions are typically built on predicting
how the context will be changed and understanding the financial
sourcing, power adjustments, and human behaviors that are required
to permit adaptation. The principles underlying these factors are quite
stable.

Adaptation is a Two-way Street: Co-Evolution

So far we have focused on the system embedded in a context having to
adapt to changes in the context. However, adaptation is a two-way
street. The embedded system is itself, an actor in the context. Its
actions change the context; example, Apple invents the iPod and the
music industry is forever changed forcing adaptation by others and
imposing a requirement on Apple into continuous functionality
improvement to counter competitive responses. This reality of
interaction between the actor and context redefining the context and
forcing adaptation from other agents is permanent and self-
generative; it means that the context is never still. Each act by any

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